Speaker
Description
It has been established that, in naturally occurring ice, exotic propagation
modes exist for radio signals. An interesting consequence of this is that it
seems possible for signal to propagate to the receiver from an area which
lies in the expected shadow zone. We present a ray tracing script based
on Fermat’s principle that has been developed with the aim to model
and understand these propagation modes. The results of this script have
been found in agreement with an earlier prediction that over-densities
are able to guide the ray paths. In addition to the in-ice problem of
propagation modes we use this approach to evaluate approximations made
in air-shower radio emission simulations and verify if the approximations
break down for certain geometries.